Sununu: Obama should 'learn how to be an American'

Via my colleague Dylan Byers, Romney uber-surrogate John Sununu went there on a conference call with reporters:

"I wish this president would learn how to be an American," Sununu, the former governor of New Hampshire, said at the beginning of the call.

Sununu would later try to walk back the remark, claiming he was referring to the President's economic philosophy, though it hardly seemed to matter.

He also touched on the issue on Fox News earlier this morning, saying Obama's youthful experiences in Hawaii and Indonesia are the reason he "has no idea" how America works:

"He has no idea how the American system functions, and we shouldn't be surprised about that, because he spent his early years in Hawaii smoking something, spent the next set of years in Indonesia, and when he came to the U.S. worked as a community organizer — which is a socialized structure — and then got into politics in Chicago. There has been no experience in his life in which he's earned a private-sector paycheck that meant anything."

Obama spokeswoman Lis Smith fired back in a statement, saying the conference call was proof the Romney camp has "gone off the deep end":

The Romney campaign has officially gone off the deep end. The question is what else they’ll pull to avoid answering serious questions about Romney’s tenure at Bain Capital and investments in foreign tax havens and offshore accounts. This meltdown and over-the-top rhetoric won’t make things better — it only calls attention to how desperate they are to change the conversation.

Sununu has always been among the bluntest and harshest of Romney's surrogates, known this year for delivering some pretty buzzworthy lines. But in spite of the myriad attacks the Romney campaign has used against Obama this year, questioning his American-ness isn't something we've seen before on a campaign call.